alias Bruce.

Killing.

Sean Paul Kelley over at The Agonist recently posted a thoughtful piece about his having been raised as a hunter and his sorting out a personal stance toward the taking of life and the sharing of the planet. In response to what he wrote, I posted a comment. With its now being hunting season (my neighbor went out for deer last week but only saw a small buck, which he spared) and the immediate aftermath of the Thanksgiving feast fest, I am posting an expanded and hopefully more thought-out version of it here:

The act of killing is something a person had damned well better take seriously.

I have fished since I was about five years old, when I waded, scared to death, at the edge of an underwater drop-off in one of the big rivers in upstate New York, at the bottom of a 300-foot gorge, with my Dad. He was crazy to have let me do this at that age, but since I ended up not drowning I'm now glad he did it. I now spin fish and fly fish wherever there is clean water, fresh or salt, including a cold, clear river near my house where a few days a ago a fat, strong, more-than-foot-long rainbow trout gave me dinner. I never set foot in a river or in the surf without intending to bring home food, whether the day turns out that way or not. When I kill a fish I know damned well I am killing a being, and I express thanks for its feeding me. Nothing fancy or sanctimonious. It's just the reality: I've killed and I'm going to eat and I need to acknowledge it.

For me personally, knowing what it feels like to kill seems like the very least I can do as a flesh-eating person, and I'm pretty weirded out by our society's accepted habit of eating dead creatures while shielding ourselves from any experience of the killing. Sure, we have all gotten hints or explicit evidence of the predatory lie we live from news stories or horrific food documentaries, and we all know that the pale flesh beneath the plastic wrap in the market was a living creature that felt pain just a while ago. But for me, if we have have never held a writhing fish in our hands and then conked it to render it unconscious before disemboweling it and cutting off its head, or if we have never followed the blood trail of a dying deer and then put it out of its suffering, or if we have never wrung a chicken's neck, something at the heart of the death-for-dinner reality has escaped us.

I know better than to get up on any high horse about this. We all have hypocrisies in our personal ways of life. It goes with the territory when our beef comes from a far-off giant processing plant and our porch furniture comes from a repressive factory regime in Asia. I like and own leather jackets, but I have never executed or skinned a cow or witnessed its death in an industrial abattoir, and I never will. I may one day own a pair of snakeskin cowboy boots, but I will never slay and skin a rattler. You have your own version of the same dynamic. I know meat eaters who very comfortably eschew any knowledge of how cattle and pigs and chickens die on corporate killing floors. I know catch-and-release fishermen and women who regard my habit of catching-to-eat as awful and self-indulgent, and I respect the conservation ethic that makes catch-and-release the rule in many waters due to sheer human traffic and mistreatment of nature. To me personally, making fish suffer purely for one's own pleasure, when one intends simply to throw them back, is barbaric. But the fact is that, even as a food fisherman, I'm wild about fishing itself. I find something both primal and connectively grounding in it. I enjoy the strength and the wiliness and the fight of a healthy fish that is fooled by what I offer. So I cannot claim that this is purely a food thing for me (although, especially these days, that's a big part of it). More messily still, even if I am stalking a particular fish that I can see in the water, I cannot control my sometimes catching a young fish that I need to put back or that may die from the ordeal of having been caught. Hunters with guns or bows, I guess, at least have more control over which animals they kill. So I freely admit that my approach to this is no tidy or clean affair. It's just my way of working out what feels balanced and what I can live with.

But I do think it is important for us, as people, to put some personal thought, some feeling, some effort into trying to work this out within ourselves, wherever that leads each of us. Our see-no-evil consumer ethic encourages the opposite. And I think that's bad. At a time when manufactured experience seems to shield us from virtually all knowledge of the effects of our way of life, I think the effort of paying attention to these questions, however conflicted and incomplete, adds some leavening to our sense of place in the living world, some sense of impact. Especially when it comes to something as essential as what we eat.

Sometimes, I think, even a little knowledge can be a good thing.

Baltimore Mayor's Card Trick.

Here's one for you:

Let's say there is a mayor. Of a major city. And the mayor is single and is dating a wealthy developer. (The mayor's administration is also granting said developer some big-ticket city contracts, by the way. But more about that later.) And at some point it comes to light that this mayor went on a shopping spree with 60 -- count 'em, 60 -- gift cards from Best Buy, Old Navy, and the area Giant supermarket chain worth about $1,500, most of which were paid for by the mayor's developer lover. Except there's a small twist: these 60 cards were allegedly intended for use by poor families during the holidays. The developer, by now the mayor's ex-boyfriend, tells a grand jury that the mayor's office telephoned him asking for a slew of $25 and $50 gift cards; the $25 cards, he says, were for single mothers and the $50 cards were for bigger families.

But, as it turned out, all 60 of them were personally used by the mayor, for the mayor.

All hell breaks loose. The mayor is indicted for felony theft and other charges. Initially, the mayor claims to have used the cards by mistake. (Yep, used up 60 cards, all by mistake. Shopping can be so confusing.) But no, wait. At the trial, the mayor's legal team makes a hairpin turn and argues that the mayor, in fact, truly believed that all these cards were intended for the mayor's personal use. So the mayor, the attorney declares to the jury, was spending recklessly in good faith. Sure, maybe it appeared a little odd for the rich boyfriend to send, as a personal token of affection, 60 small-value gift cards to the mayor's office instead of, say, sending a few big cards or a gift certificate for $1,500 to the mayor's home. But, hey, anybody can misunderstand a gift, right? So off went the mayor on an extended and thoroughly honorable mission to spend down 60 gift cards.

Welcome to Baltimore, the town where I live, where the mayor of the moment, Sheila Dixon, in a local tradition of political hacks, numbskulls, and petty thieves, is trying to set a new record for the most outrageous straight-faced claim of innocence ever. As well as a new standard for astoundingly reprehensible behavior toward the poor.

I care more about this sorry Baltimore episode than you do, of course, because I live here. Mayor Dixon is a perennial lightweight and sad sack whose un-mayorly leadership has been a local embarrassment since her election. But then, this is the town where (former mayor) William Donald Shaefer made it onto CNN by ordering a young staffer, on camera, to repeat her walk away from him while he ogled her derriere. Mayor Dixon might rightly figure that shame is extinct around these parts.

Anyway, at a time when former card-carrying Deficit Spenders For Bush Wars And Plutocratic Gluttony are now threatening to riot over federal spending to repair the damage they helped create, I thought I'd share with you Baltimore's latest little tale of political audacity.

By the way, Mayor Dixon's trial for theft, embezzlement, and misconduct is now in progress. Her perjury trial for allegedly not reporting gifts from city contractor and former boyfriend Ronald Lipscomb is scheduled for March.

You Name It.

I saw a bumper sticker like this one on a truck the other day.

What a tribute to the awe-inspiringly seductive powers of delusion. For the sake of a sought-after feeling of potency, or a fearful swipe at the specter of a black president, or a sense of heroic devotion to a single cause (e.g., guns), gaggles of scared and struggling folks are able to convince themselves that by nodding at the power of citizen-stomping corporations in a near-depression economy they are "keeping their freedom and their money." This while the New York Times reports that national unemployment has hit 17.5 percent when you factor in those who are seeking jobs, those who have given up looking, and those who are working part-time because they can't find full-time jobs.

We could detour here into a rant about far-right gullibility and brain failure, but why? It is hardly news that the back-slapping refrain of, "You've got yours, just like us, and don't let those people take any of it away from you" has been the ruling class's most effective sop for white wage slaves ever since the days of black non-wage slavery.

I heard a Republican say on the radio a few days ago that the rise of so-called social conservatism has been the worst thing that ever happened to the G.O.P. Its passing off a mob-mentality moralism as "conservatism," he said, has splintered the party's planks of true conservatism: those being belief in small government, maximum market competition, staying out of people's private lives, etc. This isn't news, either, since we know very well that today's farthest right is not "conservative" at all but a loose posse of reactionaries who like big government and violation of individual rights just fine when it does what they want: punishing women for abortions, using military and police surveillance and violence with abandon, detaining assorted feared "others" without due process, passing laws forbidding gay people to marry, and so on.

So all of this gets me to thinking: We need to make it a public point to delete the word "conservative" from the terms we use to describe such people, and substitute another.

How about "coercive?" As in, "Social coercives have shown support for a measure that would make public the names and medical records of women who have abortions." (This is true, by the way.) Or as in, "In an intra-party conflict among Republicans, coercives are calling for harsh government policies toward illegal immigrants, while business-oriented conservatives are not."

I'm still mulling over other possible terms. Maybe you'll want to as well. It's definitely time to change the lexicon. Calling people "conservatives" when they embrace government-as-God's-goon just won't cut it.

Roman Polanski: Madness.

Why is the three-decade-old case against Roman Polanski for his having had sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977 being dragged wheezily along by U.S. prosecutors, this time with a celebrity-bust drama in Switzerland?

It's not for the sake of the victim. Samantha Geimer, now 45, who Polanski had sex with after he gave her champagne and part of a Quaalude following a photo shoot with the young would-be actress, has said repeatedly over the years that the courts and media have damaged her far more than her ordeal with Polanski, and that the criminal case should have been dismissed years ago. (She sued Polanski and they settled out of court.)

Nor is this spectacle being pursued for the sake of justice. The trial, already a media circus, became a travesty when Judge Laurence J. Rittenband intervened and revoked a plea agreement reached between the prosecution and the defense. The Washington Post has reported (9/28/09) that the prosecutor, defense, and journalists at the time agreed that the judge's get-tough act stemmed from his own well-known hunger for publicity. It was in response to the judge's stunt that Polanski fled the country in fear of a prison sentence of up to 50 years.

So why is the State of California, already beyond bankrupt, flushing dearly-needed public funds on an international caper that satisfies no need and serves no one's interest? Why recruit Switzerland for an absurd extradition attempt that accomplishes nothing except to underline the hypocrisy and puritanical obsession of a nation that blithely steamrollers universal health care while breathlessly pursuing a 31-year-old sex case that even the victim says is past tense?

Somebody here needs a good therapist.

What's Wrong with This Picture?

Good intention. Bad idea.

Everything that's wrong with current assumptions about the innate nature of opinion is on this sign.

I took the photo at a gas station on the outskirts of Washington, D.C.

Email the SCLC.

(I also sent out this post as an email to many readers.)

I never thought the day would come when I would ask you to email in protest against the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization that, led by Rev. Martin Luther King, stood and fought for so many years, in the face of outright brutality, for civil rights and equal opportunity.

But now the SCLC, in a cowardly betrayal of its legacy, is seeking to fire the head of its Los Angeles chapter, Rev. Eric P. Lee, for his support of same-sex marriage. The SCLC is pandering to a deep thread of homophobia in many black communities, where stigmatizing gays plays roughly the same role that stigmatizing blacks played among insecure whites in the days of Jim Crow.

What a horrific irony that the SCLC would now choose, in 2009, a path of moral cowardice and bigotry equivalent to the banning of interracial marriage in the 1950s.

If you oppose the SCLC's bigoted perversion of its own alleged mission of civil rights, please email SCLC President Byron Clay at president@sclcnational.org or from the SCLC website at http://www.sclcnational.org . I have done so (my email is below). Please send your own. The SCLC needs to hear that we Americans who truly support civil rights will not stand for this.

__________________________________

    From:       racemanners@earthlink.net
    Subject:     Betrayal
    Date:     July 11, 2009 11:45:38 AM EDT
    To:       president@sclcnational.org

Dear President Clay,

As an African American whose parents fought for my right to live where I like and marry who I like, I am appalled to learn of the SCLC's betrayal of the civll rights of our gay brothers and sisters, in part through your attempt to remove the president of the Los Angeles chapter for his support of gay marriage.

My disgust at your pandering to bigotry -- in the name of Christianity, no less -- is almost beyond description. If anyone should understand the evil of scapegoating others in response to one's own suffering, it should be you. Our predecessors fought and died for human rights and for equal opportunity. And now here you are, acting like the equivalent of a Jim Crow racist mob.

As long as you persist in this backward and hypocritical position, I will never consider supporting the SCLC in any way, and I will tell every progressive person I know -- and I know a lot of progressives -- to withhold their support or approval of any SCLC efforts.

You bring shame to the SCLC, shame to your alleged mission of "beloved community," and shame to the civil rights movement you purport to lead.

Your moral failure is repulsive.

Sincerely,

Bruce A. Jacobs
Baltimore, MD

Infidels.

As GOP biblical bullies and moral finger-pointers are painfully learning, the problem with casting the first stone is that it usually turns out to be a boomerang.

It is long past time, in fact. for the party of stern castigation and preachy moral pretense to take a hard fall at the hands of its own weaponry.

Talk about a political party pushing its luck. Since the day that Contract With America commandant Newt Gingrich showed up at his cancer-stricken wife's bedside with divorce papers, we have known that the only straight-and-narrow quality of much of the Republican leadership is its single-minded amorality. We've known that these guys have use for Christianity mainly as a consumer brand, that they cheat on the marriages they self-righteously claim to defend, that they enjoy gay life in secret while publicly bashing gays and blocking gay rights, that they pander to the prejudices of perpetually-screwed working whites while shilling for the corporations that do the screwing, and that their moral reservoirs run about as deep as a puddle in the Sahara.

So it is poetically fitting that someone like South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford -- a man who thumps the Bible in support of faithful heterosexual-only marriage and abstinence-only teenage education, who helped kick the adulterous Bob Livingston off the GOP bandwagon, and who called for Bill Clinton to resign for lying about sex -- is now forced to publicly reconcile his own inner infidel with the jihadism of his political party.

For a sharp treatment of the ironies and consequences of all this, go to Leslie Savan's June 30 blog in The Nation, where she writes, in part:

"Like many a sanctimonious sinner before him, Sanford's stands on gay marriage, abstinence-only education, and impeaching Bill Clinton for lying about sex have set him up to fall all the harder. But beneath the obvious hypocrisy of a family values Republican committing an offense-of-marriage act lies a deeper contradiction, one that must cleave the Republican soul. Whatever Sanford's--or John Ensign's, David Vitter's, or Larry Craig's--personal demons, their bad-boy adventures cut to the central irony of today's GOP: It's devoted to the idea of private wealth and securing the rights of the individual against the tyranny of the majority, but its members themselves must adhere to an ever-narrowing set of acceptable thoughts."

I think Sanford's wife, Jenny, summed things up pretty well when she responded to a reporter who asked if she thought her husband's doings in Argentina would affect his political future.

"His career is not a concern of mine," she said. "He's going to have to worry about that. I'm worried about my family and the character of my children."

Sounds as if she feels about as much empathy for the sinking fortunes of the Republican boys' club as the rest of us do.

Seeing Whose Shadow?

So a few days ago I'm looking through my window watching a woodchuck, otherwise known as a groundhog. He (I'm picking a pronoun because I can't tell a male from a female woodchuck from a distance nor do I want to make a sufficiently close examination to know) is a pleasant enough woodchuck, unobtrusive and plump, although his pointed face and narrow-looking eyes make him less cute close up in my yard than, say, from 30 feet away in my speeding car as I silently urge one of his cousins to stay on his side of the shoulder and not try a dash across the highway in search of greener grass.

I have begun calling him "Chuck," which I know is both anthropomorphic and unimaginative, but hell, he lives under my porch and I see him every day and he's chomping my garden like I grew it just for him, so why shouldn't I be on personal terms with him? Actually, I need to take that back: I believe he is chomping my garden, but I don't know for certain because a practically Bugs Bunny-sized rabbit has also been hanging around lately. So it could be either critter who is shredding my salvia and cilantro and marigolds. And before I bait and set the Havahart live trap, I need to know whether it's Chuck or Bugs for whom I will provide free, albeit traumatic, transportation to ample grazing grounds miles away. I suspect it's Chuck.

Which is why, on this particular morning, I am intently watching Chuck through my window. (That's not him above, but a stock photo; I lack the gear to get a good close-up of Chuck.) He is a medium-sized woodchuck, not yet fully grown I'd guess but big enough to have moved into his own place, and he tends to venture forth from his burrow in the mornings, when it's cool, to browse for food and chill out in the shade. Right now, as I watch, he is methodically combing through a section of lush lawn, his nose nuzzling the carpet of grass, searching out the exact green tidbits that suit his appetite. I am amazed at how picky he is. Only after perhaps 30 seconds of waddling and nuzzling will he pause to pull and munch contentedly at the desired shoots before trundling on in search of more of whatever it is he likes. Clover? Young, tender grass? I can't tell. But his patient fussiness about food is striking, as I have also noticed with other animals, such as a feeding beaver I once wrote about.

Just as fascinating to watch is Chuck's hyper-vigilance. He bolts upright on his hind legs like clockwork every couple of minutes to scan for predators or other scary developments. The slightest odd sound – say, a small plane flying some distance away – will send him scurrying toward his burrow, where he will either nervously hover near the entrance or dive inside, waiting until all seems clear before creeping back out onto the lawn. It is completely understandable, even to a dumb human, why these habits make sense for a relatively small and timid herbivorous mammal who would make a luscious lunch for any number of carnivores, including neighborhood dogs.

But what engages me most about Chuck is the way he seems to enjoy some of his more elective choices, like when he lounges at length on the porch in the shade, reclining slightly to one side, his legs tucked beneath him like a house cat. I'm no authority on woodchuck pleasure, but this sure looks like it to me. I remember once seeing a squirrel lie down out of the sun on the porch, his head laid against the plank as if resting on a pillow, looking for all the world like an instant couch potato. And I recall seeing another squirrel tucked into the elbow of a leafy tree limb outside of my office window, fully reclined on his side on the branch, head nestled against the bark, eyes closed, taking a nap. That's right: a squirrel taking a nap. Why shouldn't he? And why shouldn't he have the experience of this and other kinds of squirrel intentionality? Who is to know? Who is to say that the intensity of a squirrel's or a woodchuck's visceral experience of life, and their desire to protect that life, does not equal ours? How can we say it doesn't? When you swat at a moth and watch it try to hide, or slap an ant in your kitchen and see the injured insect writhe, what does this tell you? I talked about this very question recently with someone who argued that these kinds of behaviors among such creatures are proof of nothing but "survival instinct:" a locked-in physiological response to danger or injury. Well, okay, but one could look at we humans' sometimes-frenetic attempts at preserving our own well-being and say the very same. Yes, we humans have the power of reason and nearly all other animals don't. But the intensity of a creature's raw sensation of life is not at all the same as reason, and I see no basis other than mere human vanity for posing reason as its prerequisite.

Which brings us to the death penalty.

The human death penalty is a classic example of this kind of vanity-based comparison of lives. It assumes that a murderer's life, by virtue of his or her crime, is subsequently worth less than that of the lives of the murdered and the lives of surviving loved ones and the rest of we non-murderers. It bases this assumption on the idea that one forfeits the right to one's own human life upon knowingly and deliberately taking another.

But there are three colossal problems with this assumption.

First, as we all know, the death penalty is inequitably executed (so to speak). Even if all racial and class bias were removed, the fact of human error would always assure that some innocent people would be executed. If you support the death penalty, you support the inevitable execution of innocents, whether you admit it or not.

Second, there is no sound evidence that killing a murderer brings much-ballyhooed "closure" to the loved ones of victims. At best, research to date shows that closure means different things to different people, and a hefty proportion of survivors find, in the end, that watching the convicted murderer die does none of the work that will ultimately be accomplished by the agonized process of good old-fashioned healing and spiritual surrender.

And third and most importantly, the very premise of murder as justice for murder utterly destroys the moral stance it claims to protect: that human life is sacrosanct. Become a backer of murder as revenge for murder, and you relinquish all claims to reverence for the sanctity of human life. You nuke your own moral foundation. You become, for the sake of presumed righteousness, the other edge of the same blade that hacked your loved one away from this earth. Sorry, but the moral physics are immutable. You cannot have it both ways.

So if we cannot kill convicted murderers without killing our moral being, what ought we do with them?

I believe that a morally-grounded society would do two things:

1.) A just society would take custody of people who have murdered and do all within our cumulative psychological knowledge and moral power to bring them to awareness and accountability for what they have done. In the place of the fruitless punishments of prolonged isolation, prison gang warfare and rape, and lifelong scapegoating, we need to take hold of those who have killed and immerse them in the most potent intervention we can muster: a combination of emotional repair and unrelenting demand for personal responsibility. With the rare exceptions of outright evil and cybernetic wire-crossing, it is an unpopular but irrefutable fact that humans who brutally or unsympathetically harm others have generally themselves been harmed in some profound way, and the prospects for rehabilitation have a lot to do with the profundity of the original harm. Some forms of damage can be addressed and countered over time to bring eventual healthy self-esteem and a sense of responsibility toward others. Some cannot. But within a confined setting where murderers are prevented from harming others, we as a society need to give this our very best shot -- for the sake of both morality and public safety. Right now, we are not even trying. And the crime is that we have both the money (consider the ballooning price of today's ineffective-by-design inmate warehousing industry and the huge costs to all of us of its failure) and the professional therapeutic knowledge to actually make productive use of incarceration. We can do this. If we are willing.

2.) A just society would make accountability toward victims, and toward the community in general, a part of rehabilitation for murderers. Instead of 30 or 50 or 100 years in a cell as an abstract penalty for having committed a horrific act, real justice requires the concrete practice of a killer's personally facing the consequences of what he has done: not just for one day in court in the face of weeping or raging survivors, but for years thereafter in a process of confrontation, conversation, and reparation that would keep a perpetrator continually aware of the meaning of his actions and his attitudes. Nothing can bring back a dead victim, including the murder of the murderer. But mandatory guided accountability – including contact with those survivors of murder victims who agree to be part of such a process – is the best hope for whatever healing is possible. Our current circus of punitive imprisonment, depersonalized "justice" for victims, and (often endlessly delayed) execution is a cruel joke that offers no resolution, no healing, and no solutions.

It goes without saying, but it needs to be said, that all of this has to be underpinned by a massive cleanup of the criminal justice process so that, say, being a black killer of a white person does not magnify one's sentence as it currently does. It also needs to be said that all the criminal justice reform in the world is meaningless until we change our public policy so that we are not running a national murder factory. We can start by treating drug addiction as a public health issue, carrying out true gun control so that American life at all socio-economic levels is not flooded with firearms, and addressing the problems of jobs and education and law enforcement that disproportionately nurture violence in poor communities.

One thing is for certain: if Chuck the groundhog deserves better than our convenient and conceited prescription for who we believe him to be, then fellow human beings do as well.

Thanks to Laurie for suggesting I put this in writing.

Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture.

Say the word aloud. Say it twice, three times, four. You're entitled. You paid for it. With your tax dollars. So did I.

We worked and earned money, and we surrendered some of what we earned to the United States government, and they spent it on, among other things, torture. It has your name emblazoned on it. Mine, too. So let's go ahead and utter those two syllables we purchased:

Torture.

The correct term is not "harsh interrogation techniques." It is not "enhanced interrogation techniques." It is not "controversial" or "contested" or "coercive" or "aggressive" or "refined" techniques, this last of which was the expression favored by the Gestapo. It is not "the tools necessary to protect the American people," as a White House operative named George W. Bush once proclaimed. It is not "sleep management." It is not "extraordinary rendition" to, er, cooperative regimes. It is not vaguely "brutal" treatment, the New York Times' latest try at dodging the appropriate descriptor. It is not placing prisoners in "stress positions" or subjecting them to "non-injurious physical contact." It is not "sexual humiliation." It is not "waterboarding."

Torture is the act of putting prisoners through the experience of drowning and feeling themselves on the brink of death. And then doing it again. And again. Sometimes more than 100 times. (If you're willing to actually know the product you've bought with your tax money, go here for a detailed physical explanation of the act of waterboarding, which dates back to the Spanish Inquisition and was also used by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Nice company for your country to be in, isn't it?)

Torture is forcibly keeping prisoners awake for 11 days in a row, shackling them to the ceiling or wall or floor in the process.

Torture is breaking prisoners' limbs.

Torture is confining people in pitch-black boxes.

Torture is having a female interrogator smear her fake menstrual blood on a prisoner who has been taught all his life to believe with all his heart that this act will cause his soul to suffer hell for eternity. And it is forcing prisoners into sex acts -- a kind of group rape -- with the same mind-crushing effect. (Don't be bamboozled by the obvious and odious misogyny of some prisoners' beliefs; if you consider a person's sexist vision of hell a fair basis for torturing him, what does that say about you? And for cultures that condone sexual torture of women to keep them in line, are you on board with the sexual torture of male alleged "illegal combatants" to keep them in line?)

Torture is employing a trained psychologist to dig for the nail-bomb of a prisoner's most deeply-buried horrific fear or hysterical phobia -- of pitch darkness, or huge insects, or sexual abuse, or certain kinds of pain -- and to then detonate it. On purpose.

Let's not kid ourselves. You and I have funded all of this, and we have tolerated it. We have not flooded our government with outrage. We have not, by any significant measure, gone to the streets to protest this sadistic rampage of American illegality and amorality. We have not, in any numbers, refused to shell out the portion of our own personal taxes that have paid for it. We have, to our credit, voted in a new president who calls torture by its name, even if he will not hold accountable those who carried it out, for which he uses the lame excuse that we must look forward, not back. (How well would that rationale go over in any criminal trial, or in disposition of any number of infamous international human rights violations, including those committed against Americans?) Admit it: as far as facing up to the consequences of our government's savage treatment of other human beings, the great bulk of we citizens have not done squat in pursuit of justice. Shaking our heads in disapproval does not count.

And let's also admit this: Years from now you or I will be in a cafe or on a bus or train and we will overhear two young people arguing. And one kid will say, "Yeah? Well, we tortured. Those years after 9/11, we did medieval stuff to people who hadn't even been charged with crimes. And this whole country full of people just stood around and watched." And the other kid will say, "Yeah, that's true."

So let's own this word. It is ours. We bought and paid for it, and we did little or nothing to stop it.

Torture.

Say it. With feeling.

Soul Priority.

So I'm casting in a trout stream a few evenings ago. It's a downright holy beautiful dusk, about 75 degrees, the light softening into dull orange as the last of the sun filters through the contours of a riverside cornfield littered with straw-colored stalks from last year's crop. The water is ice-clear and swishing-fast and I can feel its cold through my waders. A friend told me the fishing would be incredible for these few days after the big rain that swept the muck out of the stream, and she was right: the trout are leaping out of the water for mayflies, and I already have a hefty brown on my stringer that I'll gratefully take home for dinner after having returned maybe a dozen smaller trout to the water.

I am wading back upstream toward the riverbank trail to head home, and I have basically let go of fishing for the day but I figure, hell, why not cast my way back. So as I slosh upstream I make maybe my second or third casual cast, and a few feet from my left leg -- whammo! -- fish on. Nice one. Whoa. Really nice one. I give it line, play the fish out, try to avoid doing anything stupid, and I clumsily if effectively land it, and, man, it's an even bigger brown than the other, just gorgeous, fat and the length of half my arm and wet-sheened with its brown and yellow skin and red and black speckles. And now, suddenly, I have dinner for two days instead of one. I thank the river and this trout -- which is the least one can do before eating a creature -- and I resume wading upstream, shaking my head. I'd been barely fishing at that point. I'd thought I was done. Who knew?

All of which is a way of saying that time spent without intent is a good thing.

Don't get me wrong; intention matters. A lot. You'd starve without it. Ask anyone who has been hungry. Grasping intentionality, actually, has been one of the great lessons of my life. But there are also many things that planned intention will never, ever bring. A big trout in a spot where you'd never reasonably expect a trout to be is one of them.

Fact is, a nonstop diet of schemed-out intent is a bad thing. It is one of our afflictions as Americans. So many of us rush around in this moment-to-moment stream of appetites, each one 10 minutes long but cumulatively consuming a lifetime: I want this. I need that. I'll accomplish this. I'll have that. And when we look up we're fat, unhappy, sick, and then dead. Because it is never enough. Faster is not more; louder is not stronger; fuller is not happier. It's a starvation diet of gluttony. Because the less the soul gets, the more it craves, and the more it claws for satisfaction in moment-to-moment appetites, the less it receives.

I am convinced, for instance, that this soul starvation is what is behind the current product category of "Extreme" experiences: Extreme sports, Extreme amusement park rides, Extreme vacations, Extreme contests, Extreme caffeine drinks. It's a kind of buried desperation, a panting place within us that lusts for what every next moment might deliver: Wanna feel. Wanna feel.

Action -- in the sense of ceaseless American pursuit -- will never get us there.

But certain kinds of anti-action, or at least interludes of anti-action, will. This antidote to consumptive addiction goes by a million names, and each works pretty well in its way. Meditation, a temporary suspension of intent, is one. Prayer or reverence, a surrender to one's sense of a greater reality, is another. Plain old silence and stillness without plan or destination is another. Call it whatever you want. Do it in whatever way you want. But without some measure of it in your life, you are on a gerbil wheel. Which is why I think so many Americans -- including the followers of a certain goal-directed narcissism that passes itself off as fundamentalist religion -- are spinning out in the hyper-pursuit of true feeling.

A drummer I know, driving home the point at which blindingly-fast technique becomes intuition, said to me one day, "Some things are impossible to play at the speed of thought. But they can be played at the speed of feeling." A Buddhist friend of mine cited a quote: "The great matter of life and death is at hand. Do not waste time." It's all the same thing: your soul, or, if you like, the awareness at the heart of you, wants to be entirely here in the world. When it is not, it gets frantic and unhappy.

This is what, on his best days when he is not caving to expediency, President Barack Obama can now bring to American political identity: soul. I don't mean soul in the sense of cool moves and brother-with-a-red-phone power, although that's all good. I mean soul in the sense of moral integrity. Not the phony kind that praises Jesus while torturing at secret prisons, but the genuine variety that sets and follows humane and just standards for what it means to be an American. Sean Paul Kelley of The Agonist put it this way in writing about the current controversy over torture:

And still, we're asking the wrong questions about torture--meanwhile the newspapers still label it as 'harsh interrogation techniques,' like this semantic bullshit means we didn't do something horrible, unspeakable and immoral. Alas, the question still being asked comes in the form of today's New York Times headline story: 'At Core of Detainee Fight: Did Methods Stop Attacks?'

That's not the right question or even assumption to debating torture. Torture is immoral and unspeakable under any circumstances. Its efficacy shouldn't even be considered. Why am I such an absolutist about this? Because once we torture we lose our soul. There is nothing left to fight for after that, no brutality that will not be considered or implemented. We are either civilized, enlightened human beings or we are not.

We are a nation in search of some kind of equilibrium with the larger world. This will not come with proud ambition or strutted prowess or studied expertise. It will come only with an honest reckoning of what is right and how to act in accordance with how we ourselves would want to be treated. It's the kind of thing that comes only when you are not trying to prevail: when you have caught your trout and you are headed upstream toward home, having let go of any demand for more.

It's enough to make you want to sit and be quiet for a little while.